Money Makes The Schools Go ‘Round

Public schools have been a perpetual source of complaint, aggravation and unfairness for many. For parents whose children lack text books or study in crumbling structures, it’s unfair. For homeowners who own a valuable piece of real estate but have no children in school, it’s unfair. For parents whose children are forced to attend a local public school that’s failing, it’s unfair. For children forced to ride a bus for an hour each way to go to a school where their race is underrepresented, it’s unfair. And the list goes on and on, and every complaint is legit, for better or worse.

Does every “fix” for one problem exacerbate another?

Today, the lines that define school district borders are largely arbitrary. They’re zigzagging areas of local control, a term that conflates two separate concepts: the ability to oversee a group of neighborhood schools and the right to keep the proceeds from property wealth in narrow jurisdictions. The more exclusively these borders are drawn, the more advantage accrues to wealthy districts, each of which has an independent financial structure, at the expense of the students next door.

School districts arose organically, and to that extent, they are, indeed, “largely arbitrary.” They reflected the most basic concept of governance, that it’s something we choose to do together. It reflected a group of local residents deciding that they would form a district to educate their children; they would fund it, they would be in charge of whom and what it taught, they would be in control of how their children were educated.

The relationship between property value and education is symbiotic. A house in an excellent school district is worth more than the same house in a mediocre, or worse, district. People who value education are willing to pay more to be able to have their children educated well. But then, people who are incapable of paying more, even though they value education and want their kids well educated are left out in the cold.

This localism with regard to schools has been challenged legally many times, and state courts have repeatedly ruled that funding based on property taxes is unconstitutional. In all but a handful, they have ordered states to remedy the financial difference, but not to fix the borders that create the root inequity. So every year, legislatures use state money to try to fill in the gaps between what low-wealth communities can raise from confined property tax areas and what they actually need to operate.

The word “localism” is uttered as if an epithet, as if the locals are hoarding good education for themselves so as to deny this scarce resource to others whose children are equally deserving of a quality education. And the link to repeated rulings fails to sustain the assertion, as is typical for New York Times’ op-eds. But poor argumentation doesn’t mean the point lacks merit, and so states supplement local taxes to share the wealth.

This approach has not done the job. The average predominantly nonwhite district in the United States starts with a local wealth deficit of almost $2,500. State aid is so limited that on average, state legislatures are able to contribute only $260 toward closing the gap. As a result, predominantly nonwhite school districts receive a collective $23 billion less in school funding than their predominantly white counterparts, even though these districts serve the same number of students.

The problem here is that the argument is backward. The fact that some local school districts will do anything to provide their residents’ kids with an excellent education, because they have the tax base to do so, the willingness of their local residents to approve school tax votes and residents with ability to pay high taxes to make it happen, does not mean that lesser funding in other districts is inherently inadequate. It may well be, but the fact that some districts provide their students with gold-plated laptops doesn’t mean ordinary laptops can’t do the job.

But if we envision a new map of property taxation for schools — one in which district borders no longer define “local” for the purposes of education dollars, we can tap into funding that is already in the system and offset this challenge. Because larger borders encompass more communities, they can smooth out the major differences in neighborhood wealth that we see across the country.

Would redrawing school districts solve the problem, putting the wealthy and poor under the same much larger roof? Would transferring the burden from wealthy neighborhoods to poorer neighborhoods make schools better for the latter, since the former will be compelled to provide gold-plated laptops to everyone or they won’t be able to get them for their own lil darlings, or will this mean that education gets homogenized and excellent school districts will no longer be capable of existing as their funding will be siphoned off to districts lacking their tax base?

More to the point, if school district borders were redrawn to include both wealthier and poorer neighborhoods, would this undermine the value of homes in the wealthy neighborhoods so that there was a reduced tax base for everyone? There is certainly a good argument that children in poor neighborhoods are entitled to a good education, but in the effort to achieve that, will excellent education be reduced to mediocrity for lack of funding so that poorer districts can achieve mediocrity?

13 thoughts on “Money Makes The Schools Go ‘Round

  1. Dan

    > will excellent education be reduced to mediocrity for lack of funding so that poorer districts can achieve mediocrity?

    It will if the woke have their way, because excellence is bad. Because all people have identical abilities and potential (which you and I both know to be false, but must nonetheless believe), excellence can only exist as a result of oppression or as a form of it. This is just another flavor of the complaint against “income inequality”.

  2. civil truth

    Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.

  3. Chris

    Those that can afford better schools for their children will always find a way to do so. The short term thinking inherent in that proposal is so obvious. It’ll change things for a little while and then a new normal will settle into place where the upper classes will send their kids to better schools than the lower classes.

    It’s not a problem that can be fixed by simply tweaking the rules.

    1. SHG Post author

      Private schools. Parochial schools. Charter Schools. And with it, voting down school budgets. What could go wrong?

      1. LocoYokel

        This was already done in Texas (Robinhood Plan), what ended up happening is that the wealthier communities just bypassed taxes and started funding things independently. Schools in the best (most expensive) neighborhoods started having things purchased privately and donated directly to the school and the PTA started fundraising for the bigger things. This managed to work around having a certain proportion of their school taxes siphoned off for many things except basics like salaries and such.

    2. Dan

      It isn’t even necessarily a “problem” at all. The wealthy, on the whole, get more, and better, goods and services than the less-wealthy. It’s generally by valuing education and hard work (plus a little luck) that they’ve gotten to be wealthy; seeing how it’s benefited them, they’re then going to value it for their children. And having more resources to get it, get it they will. This shouldn’t be in the least bit controversial or problematic, but it is to the woke, because excellence is oppression, as is any sort of privilege (except their own).

      What is problematic is that high schools are graduating students who can’t read or write their own names. This is an orthogonal issue, not simply the opposite end of the spectrum. The rich kids’ good education isn’t taking opportunity from the kids in the poorly-performing schools. School funding isn’t the problem (I recall a study showing that distance from the Canadian border was a better indicator of school performance than dollars per student), and increasing it isn’t the solution. A great deal of the problem is sociological, but those are conversations we aren’t allowed to have any more.

  4. DaveL

    The core contention of the article is simply false. I’ve didn’t a great deal of time poring over spreadsheets from the Census Bureau that give very detailed data about public school finances. When you account for all funding sources (local, state, and federal), this funding disparity is an illusion. I’m not sure how they ended up with the figures they did, but I’ll trust the raw data over an infographic any day.

    1. SHG Post author

      I don’t know what the raw data shows, and I’ve no doubt there are poor districts that can’t afford to maintain the structures or buy new books. But that said, will a nicer building and new textbooks fix what ails bad schools?

  5. KP

    ” in the effort to achieve that, will excellent education be reduced to mediocrity for lack of funding so that poorer districts can achieve mediocrity?”
    That what always happens when Socialists get in charge. Their argument is really that education should be a Federal department so everyone in the whole country has an equal chance at the propaganda. Other countries have done this, and then found the outcomes are the same, so now poor areas get far more resources than wealthier ones.

    Strange how they’re dragging up this old weed-encrusted anchor while the rest of the world is forging ahead with how to increase remote learning and how to educate kids without sending them to school.
    Haven’t they come across covid19 yet?

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